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Foreword COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
or elaborating threads of connection between different learning encounters. Yet
such a viewpoint clearly underestimates children’s search for meaning and their
drive to discover the dimensions and relations of complex situations, as Malaguzzi
describes in the quotation on the previous page.
Who exactly are “toddlers and twos” anyway? Are they babies? Or are they
preschoolers? In fact, there is great professional uncertainty about whether
toddler­hood is a distinct phase of the life cycle, and this uncertainty bears on why
teachers may disagree on how best to support their learning. From a develop­
ment standpoint, the period bridging infancy and early childhood (between about
twelve and thirty-six months of age) is seen as a time of rapid growth and change,
yet no consensus exists among the experts about when toddlerhood begins and
ends or even about whether it is a full-fledged phase, much less a stage, of the life
cycle. Psychologists define a stage as a distinct time of development bounded by
fundamental reorganizations in cognitive and social-emotional capacities and
characterized by a unique pattern of developmental issues, tasks, and achieve­
ments. Toddlers and twos are children making their way between infancy and
early childhood, but they look more like a mix of both stages than something
categorically distinct from them. Thus, some child development textbook authors
divide their material on childhood into three major periods: infancy, early child­
hood, and middle childhood. In contrast, others treat infancy and toddler­hood as
two separate periods prior to early childhood. When authors blend toddlerhood
into infancy, they tend to place the boundary age marking the transition to early
childhood at twenty-four months. But when they treat toddlerhood as a separate
period, they tend to move the boundary age forward to the middle or end of the
third year, at thirty or thirty-six months. Whichever approach they take, psycholo­
gists tend to describe certain kinds of tasks as salient to children in their second
and third years of life: achieving autonomy and independence, forming a self-
concept, mastering impulses and regulating emotions, and becoming prosocial
and oriented to rules and standards of the community.
Todd Wanerman, thankfully, does not bother with this academic controversy
but shows us through his examples and his sequence of chapters that he inti­
mately understands the highly individualized ways that children face their life
tasks. For example, children are becoming self-reliant and concentrated in their
play, or they are overcoming fears of messy materials or dangerous-seeming stim­
uli. Toddlers also grow and change in their approach to materials from age one
to age three, in a way captured by Wanerman’s shorthand phrase “from hand­
prints to hypotheses.” I found it very helpful to think about how projects focused
on younger toddlers involve more open-ended sensory exploration of how their
hands and bodies interact with the world, while projects focused on older toddlers
involve more cognitive abstraction and purpose to probe or represent concepts
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